Two days after a wall of mud came down on the Gyirong border crossing in Tibet, the number China gives for people unaccounted for has more than doubled. The Tibet emergency management department, through 新华社, put it at 558 missing and five dead as of 3pm on the 28th, with 260 of the missing being foreign nationals. The first official count, issued at 8pm on the 26th, was 265 missing and three dead, and said explicitly that casualty figures were still being checked.
The Chinese accounts are consistent about where it started. The mudslide occurred on the Nepali side, at about half past ten on the morning of the 26th, and it was the Gyirong port — the crossing itself — that took the casualties. That framing matters when the figures from the two countries are set side by side: China is counting one border post and the road to it, not a river system.
Two people have been pulled out alive. At a press conference in Gyirong town on the 27th, the rescue command said two villagers from Resuo had been rescued, and gave the same 558 and 260 that stand now. A search team reached the boundary gate between China and Nepal at half past four that afternoon, in what the account calls great difficulty, and sent images back.
The response was declared at level one for natural disaster relief in Shigatse and a forward command post was set up. 科技日报, quoting a state broadcaster reporter at the scene, describes what was sent: armed police from the Shigatse detachment first, then two hundred specialists in geology, engineering and rescue drawn from Beijing, Lhasa, Chengdu and Chongqing, carrying a hundred and twenty pieces of equipment including survey drones, three-dimensional laser scanners and life detectors. A second wave of a hundred is standing by.
Why it is on the board
Top of Weibo's hot-search list when we collected, and second and fourth on Baidu's — three ranking hits, the strongest consensus we have seen in China.
It should have been on this board two days ago. Two things stopped it. Our topic classifier had no Chinese vocabulary for disasters beyond earthquake, typhoon, flood and fire, so 泥石流 and 失联 read as unclassified and the item was held for a human. And our replacement rule had no time in it, so the Chinese board — none of it newer than the 25th — could not take anything. Both are fixed; this is the first article in.
확인: 新华社 · 中国新闻网 · 科技日报